Authors:
Nicolas T. Courtois
1
;
Pouyan Sepehrdad
2
;
Guangyan Song
1
and
Iason Papapanagiotakis-Bousy
1
Affiliations:
1
University College London, United Kingdom
;
2
Qualcomm Inc., United States
Keyword(s):
Cryptanalysis, Finite Fields, Polynomial Equations, Block Ciphers, NP-hard Problems, MQ Problem, Phase Transitions, XL Algorithm, Grobner Bases, ElimLin, Prediction, Time Series.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applied Cryptography
;
Cryptographic Techniques and Key Management
;
Data and Application Security and Privacy
;
Data Engineering
;
Data Protection
;
Databases and Data Security
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Security in Information Systems
;
Security Requirements
Abstract:
There are two major families in cryptanalytic attacks on symmetric ciphers: statistical attacks and algebraic
attacks. In this position paper we argue that algebraic cryptanalysis has not yet been developed properly due
to the weakness of the theory which has substantial difficulty to prove most basic results on the number of
linearly independent equations in algebraic attacks. Consequently most authors present a restricted range of
attacks which are shown experimentally to work with their computer but refrain from claiming results which
would work on a larger computer but have not yet been tested. For example in recent 2015 work of Raddum
we discover that (experimentally) ElimLin attack breaks up to 16 rounds of Simon block cipher however it
is hard to know what happens for 17 rounds. In this paper we argue that one CAN predict and model the
behavior of such attacks and evaluate complexity of the attacks which we cannot yet execute. To the best of
our knowledge this has never been d
one before.
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